Improved Selection Of Text And Objects In The New Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office has gone through major changes in its design to fit properly on touch devices running Windows 8. These changes are made so as to increase the user experience and give users the best experience of touch they ever had. Office has improved touch responsiveness, touch targeting, text and object selection, typing and commanding for touch devices. In this tutorial we will be discussing how it has enhanced its text and object selection technology to give a smooth and silky experience to the users.

For desktop systems we have keyboard and mouse facility available which helps us a lot in selecting text and objects. We can easily click on the objects, text and drag and move them anywhere we want, however, in case of touch devices this is not the case. Text and object selection is quite a headache! There are many possibilities that you select a wrong text or object while touching the screen, especially in an Office like complicated software that has tons of features on the screen.

Office team accepted the challenge and joined hands with Windows team to bring the best experience to the users by solving this problem. Office introduced new text selection handles that are large enough to be moved by finger tips. With Windows well developed guidelines for increased touch targeting on Windows apps, it is very easy for the app to recognize what the user really wants to touch on the screen. With this technology integrated into the Office we can easily select the handles of the selected text or object to resize, drag the object or text across the screen. These new text selection handles have been implemented in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Visio, Lync and messages in Outlook.

Another cool feature that really impressed me in the new Office is that we can select multiple objects by keeping our one finger down on one object and tapping other objects to consider them in the one selection. It is somewhat the same method as you do on desktop systems by pressing and holding Ctrl key while you are clicking with mouse on different objects to consider them in the one selection. This gives us a lot of control over getting done with the complex tasks. When I saw the Text and Object selection video by Microsoft Office, I was really impressed how responsive it was and how easily the user was selecting text and objects and resizing, dragging them across the application. That was very impressive. I would also suggest you to watch this video and get acquainted with the hard work of the Office team.

It is very nice to see that Microsoft, with each new advancement in its technologies, takes the Office to the next level of productivity and ease. There was a severe need of a proper Office suite for touch devices. With Windows 8 optimized for touch devices, especially Surface tablet we can now enjoy the ultimate office suite of all times on the tablets. The Office team has well troubleshooted the problems we used to face on other applications designed for touch devices.

Omar Tariq Jutt is a professional tech blogger with a lot of experience in writing Tech articles. He is a Ubuntu user and keeps a sharp eye on tech updates. Currently he is studying software engineering and sees his future as a web entrepreneur.